30 Seconds of Sound

A piece created by Peter Clark for Simon Pyke's 30 Seconds of Sound collaboration. View the other artist's submissions at: 30s.ec

30 SECONDS OF SOUND

I signed up to work with the master of soundscapes, Simon Pyke to create a continuous psychedelic zoom for his 30 seconds of sound collaboration. The piece follows a signal's point of view as it's intercepted from deep space, travels through a satellite network and then experiences the vast abstract nature of the net.

Microscopic Ice Tests

The time lapses had several issues with flickering lights and we're incredibly time consuming so I decided to move on to a technical direction that allowed for faster iterations.

My initial concept revolved around microscopic worlds, so I did various time lapse tests using circuit boards frozen in ice cubes. The sequences were shot on a Lumix GH4 with a Yasuhara Nanoha X5 Lens.

Geographic Satellite Imagery

I tried various locations all around the USA, finally resolving with the Goldstone Deep Space Observatory in California. It felt like a logical fit since they regularly receive signals from the far reaches of space.

To show the signal entering earth's atmosphere, I wanted to use an aerial perspective. I did various zooms on Google earth and captured them as image sequences, usually taking several hours to generate.

Interface

I created an interface design to show the signal picking an entry point as it invades Goldstone's observatory.

Circuit Tunnel

Unfortunately the texture mapping looked awful on a wide angle lens so I decided to abstract the circuits as low-poly elements with subtle textures mapped across them.

I used Agisoft's Photoscan software to create a three dimensional model of a circuit board. The circuit board was then duplicated in cinema 4D to create a spiraling tunnel that launches our signal into oblivion.

Static Core

I took several 4K videos of TV static and wrapped them to circles and rectangles in Cinema 4D. The stretched video textures created interesting optical patterns, which got even weirder when I began adding reflective objects to the scene.

Mirror Room

I ran the same TV static patterns through a long tunnel of reflective cubes, which created an infinity room effect. The blocks dissolve away to reveal the next psychedelic portion of the signal's journey.

Liquid Crystal Display

Using a Laboval 4 Microscope, I took several videos of a broken LCD screen. Various saturated colors and liquid textures could be animated by pressing on the screen's surface. I then wrapped these trippy textures to the surface of a long geometric tunnel in Cinema 4D.

Spiral of Doom

To add some evil elements to the piece, I transformed the bright psychedelic LCD screen tunnel into a dark spiral of doom. Trapcode form was used to generate an organic dot pattern, which I wrapped on the tunnel's surface in Cinema 4D. The flickering elements are a glitch caused by cell renderer in Cinema 4D.

Mandala

In the final scene, our signal finds it's source and drifts through a mirrored world of interlocking line work.